Sermon for MHBC (31 July 2022). You can watch on our website or on Facebook or YouTube. Live at 11:00am on Sundays.
This passage may not seem relevant to everyone, but at its core, Jesus is teaching about desire. He’s teaching that we don’t have to be driven by our desires. Just like Adam and Eve in the garden, who find the forbidden tree desirable, we have many disordered desires, but those desires are meant to ultimately be ordered toward and aimed at God. So regardless of your age or marriage status, I hope you will hear the broader applications in this teaching.
Let’s look at the passage, starting in v. 27: You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ Here just like we saw last week, Jesus is quoting from the Ten Commandments.[1] But once again, Jesus wants to get to the heart. He’s not interested in the sort of self-righteous pretense that says, “I would never commit adultery,” all while having a heart ruled by lustful desires.
As humans, we are skilled at superficial self-justification. We are skilled at looking at a behavior and saying, “Well I don’t do that,” so I’m good. But Jesus isn’t interested in superficial righteousness. He wants us to go deeper, to the level of the heart, to what’s going on inside.
Look at v. 28: But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Now what’s the problem with this lustful intent in the heart? For one, it has already set us on a path toward destruction. If the act is already committed in the heart, we are already engaging in the act in some way.
Consider this situation. Have you ever wanted to speak your mind frankly to someone? You rehearse it. You imagine it. You practice it. And you resolve that if you get the chance, you’re going to say what you have to say. What happens? Almost always, we find a way to say it, to work it into the conversation, even if it wasn’t called for. Why is that? Because we had already purposed it in our heart. You may have heard Prov 4:23 before: Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life. What goes on inside is the engine that drives what happens outside.
Jesus exposes how the intent of our heart drives us. Notice once more what he says. If anyone looks in order to lust, he has committed adultery in his heart. What’s going on inside is the most important thing about us. Jesus teaches this in Mark 7: And He [Jesus] said, “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.”[2]
How is my heart? What’s going on in my heart? These are some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves. And more importantly, these are the matters that we must bring before God in prayer.
Make no mistake about it: what is inside will come out one way or another even if we successfully keep it covered from the great majority of people who interact with us. But it will likely come out sideways like the man who leaves his wife of three decades for another woman.
Second, this unchecked lust makes it impossible to love our neighbor. Last week, we talked about how our anger devalues the other person. The same can be said for our desires. Desire seeks to be satisfied. It doesn’t want to serve unless it is in view of satisfaction. And when we are driven by to satisfy our desires, we treat other people as objects—tools for our satisfaction. By the way, we don’t need to limit this to physical desires. This is true any time we want something from someone. We run the risk of treating them as an object that exists for the satisfaction of our desires.
In Rom 13:9, Paul makes the connection to loving our neighbor explicit. Listen to what he writes: For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not bear false witness,” “You shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
So our desires are necessarily linked to our love for our neighbor, and only by learning to rightly order our desires, can we rightly love our neighbor.
So what do we do? Jesus tells us that we deal with our desires drastically because they have devastating consequences. Drastic measures are necessary because of devasting consequences. Look at what he says in vv. 29–30: If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.
If our desires run the show, they will destroy us. Listen to what Peter says in 1 Pet 2:11: Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. Desires wage war against our soul. They may feel good and satisfying, but indulging these desires is like letting an enemy slide us a cup of poison.
In Proverbs 7, we are told about a young man who is enticed by a woman. She says, “Let’s indulge ourselves” (v. 18). And then we read these harrowing words, “He did not know it would cost his life” (v. 23). The Proverb closes with this warning: “Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways” (v. 25).
Some of the worst advice we can give to ourselves is “to follow your heart.” Far better is what we saw earlier, “Guard your heart.”
In fact, that’s a primary concern in the final two verses in our passage. In these verses, Jesus addresses the topic of divorce, but underlying that is this basic issue: letting our desires dictate our actions. Look what he says in vv. 31–32: Furthermore it has been said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.
Now there was a great debate in Jesus’s day about the grounds for divorce. In fact, the phrase “for any reason” in v. 32 seems to be Jesus weighing in on that debate. See on the basis of a passage in Deuteronomy 24, certain teachers taught that men could divorce their wives for virtually any reason. As always, Jesus corrects the twisting of Scripture and shows that such a desire is really just a desire to commit adultery.
Let’s not lose sight of the primary point that Jesus is making. Being driven by our lusts and desires is a sure path to adultery and destruction no matter how we justify it.
But while we are here let me say something very brief, really far too brief, about divorce, remarriage, and singleness/celibacy. First, there are biblical grounds for divorce. Divorce is never ideal, but the party at fault is the one who violates the marriage vows. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul talks about the situation where a follower of Jesus is deserted by an unbelieving spouse. He says, “But if the unbeliever departs, let him depart; a brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases.” Now there is debate about what he means by they are not under bondage. It could simply mean they are not required to try to salvage that marriage. Or it could go a step further and indicate they would be free to remarry. At the end of the chapter, he does permit widows to remarry as long as they marry someone who follows Jesus.
But in between all of that, Paul also talks about singleness and celibacy. And we really don’t talk about this enough, but he clearly states that singleness and celibacy have clear advantages for the spiritual life.
So I want to say several things. If you have experienced divorce, you are not broken or irreparable. This world is complex and there is grace for that.
If you’ve never been married or you are currently single, you are not second class. In fact, you may well have a unique gift that those of us who are married do not have. In other words, you should not necessarily feel obligated to pursue marriage. I would actually encourage you to flip the script and strongly consider whether the Lord has called you to singleness for his own service. Singleness can be of tremendous benefit and is clearly the preferred case in 1 Corinthians. If the Lord has called you to singleness, celebrate that, and we want to celebrate that with you.
All of this comes down to a basic point that extends well beyond physical relationships. Even though the prevailing mood of our culture is to fully embrace our every desire, the Christian life calls for restraint upon our desires. In fact, those desires are improperly ordered. They are out to destroy us by pointing us toward all the wrong things. The idea of fully embracing our natural desires is the opposite of Christianity. And here’s why.
Sin is an enslaving force, not merely a list of arbitrary rules. Sin corrupts, distorts, and destroys all that is good in God’s creation. It drives us away from our Creator. So in God’s infinite wisdom, he has orchestrated a plan to break the power of sin. God becomes flesh and in Christ Jesus, sin (that enslaving force) is nailed to a cross. It’s not just forgiveness that we need, though that cannot be overstated, we also need the pervading power of sin to be broken, we need to be released from chains that keep us dead to the things of God. And that is what Christ has won for us on the cross. That is what we call the gospel. And because of that, embracing the very things Christ nailed to the cross is akin to a freed prisoner voluntarily returning to the prison that was intent on making him suffer and ultimately killing him.
The gospel breaks the power of sin and sets us free. Only through the gospel of Jesus can we overcome the power of sin. Listen to what Paul writes in Rom 8:13: For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. How do we kill the deeds of the body? By the Spirit. Unless we have believed upon Christ, we will have no power over sin because we do not have the Holy Spirit. Step one, then, is to believe upon Christ.
Step two is to fan our affections for the things of God and crowd out our old desires. Notice even in this verse, and this is true in so many similar passages, that there is a contrast. We can fan the flames of our natural desires, or we can fan the flames of the Holy Spirit at work in us. There are lots of practical ways to do this. We can think often of what Christ has accomplished for us. We can remind ourselves of the consequences of sin. And one of the most basic ones is prayer.
Prayer is, in many ways, aligning our desires. In prayer, we bring all of our natural desires before God and ask God to reorient them. We ask God to turn our natural desires for pleasure to him. In fact, as Augustine argued our desires are really intended to increase our longing for God.[3] He puts it this way, “The whole life of a good Christian is a holy desire.”[4]
So if you’re single and your longing is painful, ask God to fix your longing on him. If lust is pulling you, ask God to reorient it toward him. In prayer, we open up the deepest parts of ourselves to God, asking him to take up greater space in our hearts where all these longings and desires are stirring.
All of this to say that Jesus doesn’t tell us that singleness or marriage is preferred, but he does show us a way of not being driven by our disordered desires. He does show us a way of breaking the generational sin that goes back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. Our disordered desires are out to destroy us. But through Jesus, the Holy Spirit can reorder our desires toward God so that we find the true source of all our longing.
[1] Exod 20:14.
[2] Mk 7:20–23. Notice the connection to the heart in v. 19: “… because it does not enter his heart but his stomach …”
[3] See Christopher West, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing, pp. 77–78 citing Augustine, Homilies on 1 John
[4] Homilies on 1 John 4.6 available at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/170204.htm